Will General Motors respond to 2015 Corvette C7 Z06 criticisms by offering active ground effects on its "flagship"?

The disgrace of the newest Corvette Z06 continues to grow.  If the poor off the line performance, heat soak and overheating issues were not bad enough, there is a new insult to the current Z06 injury: the upcoming Cadillac CTS-V performance figures released by +General Motors long ahead of actual car's release.

What is the specific issue that the upcoming CTS-V creates for the already limping (pun fully intended) Corvette C7 Z06?  The specific issue relates to the top speed the GM marketing team claims the upcoming CTS-V can achieve: 201 mph.  Not only would the upcoming Cadillac be considerably faster than the Corvette flagship but it would be doing it while weighing considerably more (over 400 lbs more), offering two more seats and two more doors.  All of this accomplished with a DETUNED version of the LT4 engine!!!  Of course the upcoming CTS-V 3.7 second 0-60 does not help either but this is besides the point, in this case.

Things must really suck for +Tadge Juechter by now, considering that the claim of the "fastest production Corvette ever" (bullshit all on its own) is being officially thrown out of the window, courtesy of the BMW wannabe 4-door sedan, typically not associated with high performance circles.

How is this possible that first the Hellcat evil twins ream the Z06's ugly ass and now, of all things, a Cadillac sedan will be following the same path?

As already pointed out in this blog many times, the aerodynamics of the new Corvette, including the Z06 are truly awful, creating so much turbulence (not to be mistaken with the claimed downforce) that any attempts to extract high speed performance are bound to fail (this part is already well proven as well).

The writing was already on the wall for Z06 at the time Hennessey did his 200 mph run in a base Stingray, with considerably better aerodynamics, lesser weight and smaller frontal area.  Needing 700 hp to break the 200 mph barrier should have given everyone a good clue what will happen with the flagship. 

Of course as expected, neither Juechter or the kool aid drinking Corvette buying inbreeds chose to do a reality check and this is why the porker Z06 is where it is, dealing with one of the worst PR disasters in Corvette's history that  already translate in a sales failure as well.

So what is there for GM to remedy this failure?  The urban and truly false myths circulate regarding aftermarket magic offering a magic tune, along with undersized supercharger pulleys and other forms of warranty erasing automotive snake oil.  But how about GM and Juechter, what can they do?

Right off the bat, the logical solution would be to clean up the car's aerodynamics and offer less turbulent and more flexible ground effects.   The problem here is that the entire car is aerodynamically flawed, something that must be a very hard pill to swallow for Juechter.  Would employing active ground effects as the modern world uses (except for Viper and Mustang of course) fix the current problem?  Most likely, it would not make a dent in shoddy performance sufficient to justify the expense, not to mention the added weight and more reliability problems (like Z06 needs more parts to fail than it has already).

At this time, it is unlikely that GM will invest in the expense of redesigning the body of the car, creating a less turbulent front end and cleaner undercarriage and rear end areas to create a valid starting point to adding downforce generating devices.   The air brake aka rear spoiler is most likely a great high speed limiting device, seeing what happened to Jim Mero at Nurburgring certainly validates this point.

The bottom line here is that this so called Z06 is at a very dead end of the road already.  What happens next should be very interesting but one thing is unfortunately known:  improving the ground effects mess will not be enough to make Z06 a better car.